How Dat Moi Market serves 60 countries of food on one grocery system
Vori
•
July 22, 2026
Dat Moi Market
Gardena, CA
3,785 sqft
Dat Moi Market is using VoriOS with Pricing Management and Marketing & Loyalty tools.
Bottom Line
"41 years. One family. And Vori is the first system to fit our needs."
Overview
Dat Moi means new land. The name was on the building when the family bought the store in Gardena in 1985, and they kept it.
Ten years before that, as Saigon fell, the family left Vietnam on a fishing boat with about fifteen relatives aboard. Tam, the eldest sister, was born at sea and delivered by her grandfather. They were picked up, spent time in a refugee camp, and were eventually sponsored to California. Their father had been a fisherman back home. He took work as a welder in San Pedro while their mother worked an assembly line, and once they had the store, he was up at two in the morning buying product in downtown LA and closing the doors at nine at night.
The market they bought was about a quarter the size of the store standing today. They bought out the businesses next door as they grew, and the five people working there at the start have become more than forty.
Today Dat Moi is a meat and seafood market and a world market. The store carries food from more than 60 countries, from Thailand to Trinidad. The fish counter runs whole fish, some of them massive. Oxtail is sold whole and cut to order. The Jamaican aisle carries sorrel, spices, and scotch bonnet peppers that people will drive three hours to buy, and shoppers come in from Bakersfield and Palmdale because what is on the shelf is a piece of home.
"Here at Dat Moi Market, we're proud to serve cuisines from over 60 different countries, from Thailand to Trinidad and everything in between."
Challenge
A restaurant POS in a grocery store
Before Vori, Dat Moi ran on Toast for about four months. Toast was built for restaurant menus, and a store selling thousands of items across dozens of cuisines put pressure on it right away. Adding a new item meant getting someone onto a computer in the back office. Cases had to be looked up on a printed sheet and keyed in by hand.
Every produce lookup slowed the lane
Toast ran on a touchscreen with no number pad. To ring okra, a cashier typed out the word, waited for the results, and picked the item off a list. Customers here fill full baskets and the parking lot holds only a handful of cars, so those seconds showed up in the line.
"Before Vori, it would take us a long time because we had to search up the item. We didn't have an actual number keypad. The line would just keep growing."
No EBT at a store where EBT is essential
Roughly 15% of payments at Dat Moi run on EBT, and Toast could not process it. When a customer wanted to split a balance across two EBT cards, or across a card and cash, the cashier had to ring it as separate transactions while the line stacked up behind them. Some of those shoppers had been coming to the store for twenty years.
"Back on Toast, they did not offer EBT. That made it difficult for some of our customers to pay for their items."
A back office that ran on memory
Ordering, pricing, and inventory lived in spreadsheets and in people's heads. Prices got memorized. Invoices got checked by hand, line by line. The store had never run a rewards program and had no way to reach a shopper between visits.
Solution
One system built for how grocery actually runs
Vori installed in mid-October 2025. The team flew out and stayed on site for three days, working the lanes with the cashiers and the back office with the leads. The front-end leads had it down in under an hour and were training the rest of the staff the next day.
"The Vori team was knowledgeable, and they were able to help us out with our questions. The transition was smooth."
Checkout that keeps the parking lot moving
Vori gives cashiers a physical number pad alongside a search field, so produce rings by code in about a second. Cases scan as cases. When something is missing from the system, a lead can add it from a handheld right there on the floor, and it rings at the register on the next customer.
"With Vori, you just press the number, enter, and that's it. Transactions go by quick, so it makes customers even happier. They're in and out."
EBT and split tender at the register
Vori takes EBT, credit, debit, and cash in the same checkout flow, and it works out program eligibility on its own so the cashier does not have to. A basket can be split across two EBT cards, or across a card and cash, inside a single transaction. At Dat Moi that comes up every day.
"The fact that you're able to take EBT was a big deal. A lot of our customers use it, so it's essential. Split tender is very common for us at checkout."
Ordering, receiving, and inventory in one pass
Invoices get photographed and uploaded from a phone, and Vori pulls the costs and quantities off them. Cost changes surface as product is received, so a vendor increase gets caught at the back door on the day it lands. Ordering, receiving, and inventory all run in the same place, which is a first for a store that has always kept it on paper.
"With Vori, we can do ordering, receiving, and inventory all in one. It's one click away and you're good to go."
Price changes the team can make in seconds
When a cost moves, Vori shows the margin hit and puts recommended retail prices on the screen. Helen reviews the options, picks one, and the new price syncs to checkout without anyone doing the math by hand.
"I don't have to think too much about the price change. The options pop up and you just select which price you like."
Rewards and campaigns that reach shoppers who drive hours
Dat Moi had never run a rewards program. Shoppers enroll with a phone number at the register, and Olga can text the whole list when scotch bonnet peppers land, when holiday hours change, or when a limited shipment hits the floor. Customers driving in from Bakersfield or Palmdale know what is in stock before they get in the car.
"We didn't used to have a rewards program with our old POS system. People like to get rewarded for shopping with us. It's a big deal for them."
Support that answers the same day
Dat Moi has a real point of contact at Vori and hears back the same day. When something needs more digging, the team says so, works it, and comes back with an answer. The three days on site during install set the tone, and it has held up since.
"The one thing I really like about Vori is their customer service. They get to you within the same day. And if it's something they cannot figure out, they investigate and get back to you."
Results
Checkout is faster and the lanes hold through the rush, which keeps the parking lot turning over on a weekend. New cashiers are comfortable on the register inside an hour. Ordering, receiving, and pricing all run through one system, and the team is catching cost changes as product comes through the door.
"Rush hour with Toast was very time consuming. Now with Vori, we've been able to regain those minutes back."
For 41 years the family has run one location. They are starting to talk about a second.
"We haven't really had to consider scaling until now. But there are a lot of conversations about growing the business, and we can see how Vori fits into that."
Why It Matters
Dat Moi has spent 41 years being the place in Los Angeles where a customer from Cameroon, Jamaica, Vietnam, or Mexico can find what they grew up eating. It is a hard store to run. There is fish moving by the pallet, thousands of items coming in from dozens of countries, a small lot that has to turn over all day, and a family that shows up to hold it together. They needed a system that could carry all of that, and Vori is the first one that has.
"Grocers are the cornerstone of America, and Vori helps businesses like us succeed."
About Dat Moi Market
Founded in 1985 by a Vietnamese refugee family and now run by the second generation, Dat Moi Market is a meat, seafood, and world market in Gardena, California. The store carries food from more than 60 countries and is known across Los Angeles for its whole fish, full oxtail, and Caribbean and African groceries. Forty employees serve a community that drives in from across the state.
Visit Dat Moi Market
📍 14415 Crenshaw Blvd, Gardena, California 90249
🕗 Mon thru Sat - 8:30am to 6:00pm; Sunday - 8:30am to 5:00pm
🌐 https://www.datmoimarket.com/
📸 Instragram: @datmoimarket